Monthly Archives: May 2011

The last few months have seen one thing sweeping across the island’s politics – austerity. The governments north and south are shifting the consequences of the greedy bankers to ordinary working class people, with young people being particularly hard hit. Youth unemployment is at an all-time high and very expensive university degrees are becoming worthless.

A survey carried out across the North and South of Ireland found that 32% of respondents between the ages of 15-34 had smoked cannabis. The majority of arrests for drug offences are related to the sale or possession of cannabis. The fact that cannabis is illegal, forces users to go to drug dealers to buy it.

On the first anniversary of the death of Comrade Peter Hadden we republish an article he wrote in 2008 on the 20th anniversary of the killing of three IRA volunteers in Gibraltar and the subsequent events. This article is an important Marxist analysis of these events, but more than that it is a critique of the futility of IRA's campaign of individual terror, the role of British imperialism and a confirmation that the national question in Ireland can only be resolved through the building of a mass movement for socialism based on working class unity.

At the end of March the Fine Gael/Labour Government announced a €24 billion bailout for Ireland's four remaining banks. In so doing, the government indicated that their banking policy is a mere carbon copy of that previously pursued by Fianna Fail and the Green Party. Here, socialistparty.net, looks at the very real prospect for default which haunts the establishment.